Abstract

This article aims at offering an interdisciplinary overview of the rise of wallpaper in the European market between the 18th and the 19th century and it analyzes its later diffusion from luxury item for noble mansions to upper- and middle-class interior decoration. Based on coeval business sources, and international literature on material culture and interior decoration history, the article also explores the less known function of wallpaper as medium for political emotions and propaganda in the version of the Napoleonic and Philhellenic panoramas produced and exported by main French manufactures in the early Restoration, while some success stories from the Victorian Age and the Gilded Age document till the late 20th century the product’s versatility both as an artistic avant-garde output and a domestic emotional transfer. Some recent cases of revival and re-enactment in museum design and memorial celebration are finally examined, as well as the alternative use that wallcoverings’ stratification has played over time to conceal, or even to censor, better than to show: wallpaper has thus performed a unique role shifting from the private to the public space, this one being a fertile perspective which may deserve further investigation.